SO POWERFUL. An Amazingly real and touching film. The story is what is so incredible about this movie because it is so believable. At every turn the plot deals the main character the realistic outcome of the scenario he’s facing, often against the wishes of the audience, only because it serves to make them cry out in grief at all the misfortunes that life deals to you. Whereas most other films would have deus-ex machina events or something happening in the nick of time to help the protagonist this film denies that man his salvation and allows him to wallow in the tragedy of his circumstances.
This film honestly depicts humanity and the woes facing man in the modern world, a world driven by money and emotionally disconnected from the suffering of those who can’t even make enough to feed themselves. This isn’t a communist film, it’s a realist film. There is no happy ending. The son walks away with his father just having witnessed him drop to the level of a common criminal in order to try to feed his son who he can’t even feed after failing to successfully steal a bike. That scene where the son has to make his way through a crowd to beg for his father to be released is so incredibly sad. And it's in that sadness that the man who he robbed sees the desperation of the man and his son and allows him to go.
You see the criminal reality of Italy, Rome especially, and how complicit everyone is. When the mother of a criminal cries out “My boy is such an innocent sweet boy, why would you do this to him” you can tell that she clearly knows her son is a criminal and she is only saying these things to protect him. It shows the mentality that you do what you must to protect your family, even if it is lying to the police. That’s the truth of this film, especially in regards to the Post War World.
This film shows a country that just lost a war and lost itself in the process and has a great deal of guilt, especially family guilt, personal guilt, and guilt over the violent or anti-human actions of family members during the war.
The shooting is great. The shot selection really shows you the location as the cuts hop 90 degrees in axis against the character’s movements so you can really see the fullness of the location and spaces. And the cuts really do jump often 180 degrees showing one direction of a hallway and then totally cutting to the other viewpoint without orienting you, but you still follow what is going on even though the edits are somewhat jarring in that sense. The focus, like all the great movies up until this point, is on the actors, their actions, and what they are doing and showing on their faces. All of the camerawork is designed to focus you on the actors and the plot.
You can forget all the wonderful compositions in the world when you’re watching a story that is reality that you can relate to and feel the pain of the character inasmuch as you can see yourself in his shoes. That's the lesson of this film. For all the technical achievement a director can make in a film, it's truly only the story that matters at the end of the day.
This film is an iconic piece Italian Neo-Realism, a period of filmmaking influenced by WW2 that intends to show the world as it really is. This is in tandem to film noir I would argue and the realist shift that occurred in global cinema around the turn of the 40’s with WW2 really shattering the moral compass of everyone and causing filmmakers to re-examine the notion of Right vs. Wrong in this new paradigm shift.